They know they'll find workarounds, they'll just arrest whoever is involved in the workarounds. Law isn't a computer firewall, it's a loaded weapon.
The beauty of VPNs is that you do not need to have a presence in the UK to make or sell one. And there's a huge amount of money in it. The law is very bad at dealing with such realities, see also piracy and drugs. The last time I checked TPB is still accessible in the UK with only DoH.
Some ISPs block based on TLS SNI sniffing (so perhaps ECH will save us)
You see, the problem is that all exit points of our VPNs are in Europe. These too can be banned quite easily. Where to will we run next, given that this cancer tends to spread?
Run to the Kremlin, with torches in your hands.
Yeah right, that worked out for Iranians quite well all these times.
I'm a Brit living abroad, when I visit the UK I use a Tailscale network with an exit node at my home, and yeah this always seems to work for me. Going the other way around to try and watch British TV I used to find with a normal hosted VPN services could still figure out I wasn't in the country, but now I have a Tailscale exit node at my mum's place in the UK it always works fine. So I suspect it all comes down to th…
Apps can read sim card info. Its country and whether the card is currently in roaming, you can't full them that way You would need to get your sim card out of your phone and use wifi or buy one of them foreign esim For vpns I actually found that websites that block vpns for some reasons are worse at detecting commercial vpns than when you deploy your own on vps --- Also I forgot about other things. When my phone for…
In Russia, they claimed that new measures to block websites are necessary to protect the children online. Of course, they immediately used these new capabilities to block opposition websites and sources critical of the government. Now, seeing many European governments tirelessly push for these new measures to protect the children , I'm pretty sure that the children are finally going to be safe online.
It is really disheartening to see the sentiment around privacy erode like this. Fifteen or even ten years ago this would have been unanimously and vehemently opposed, but now it is somehow up for debate?
How would that work? The UK can presumably ban Mullvad from operating in the UK, but I don't see how it can prevent outbound connections to Mullvad servers elsewhere, short of implementing a nation-wide firewall like China or Iran. And even in those places the firewall is pourous and routinely circumvented.
What if I use a VPS instead? What if it's a virtual private VPS wholely in memory? What if it's a pool of VPS boxes shared by me and a network of people? There's always a way around, but this direction is concerning.
They're banking on the number of kids using that mechanism to bypass the ban being small.
I'm not in favour of this but I'm acknowledging that if the number of children accessing social media drops significantly because of a VPN ban then they've achieved what they set out to do.
I don't like the salami slice tactics of not including this in previous legislation despite knowing that it would be necessary to enforce the social media ban. There would have been a lot less support if it was presented as a complete package that could be debated in it's whole.
Non-nationalist parties that have been in power in Europe for so long are shitting their pants at the growing rise of nationalist parties and are absolutely planning to censor the shit out of them. I'm not even taking a side here and what they are trying to do is obvious.
How is that happening? In the UK fringe nationalist parties are typically given as much airtime on main stream media as the governing parties. They've also setup their own 'news' stations to further spread propaganda. Any notion that they're being censored in the UK is ludicrous. They're pandered to.
This isn't an axis from freedom to control, with the country sitting at an identifiable point. All of these things are happening, antagonistically, at the same time. Right wing people set up a television station, government cracks down on the internet, courts protect people's rights to express philosophical beliefs, police record "non-crime hate incidents" for things written online. It's all chaotic.
It is really disheartening to see the sentiment around privacy erode like this. Fifteen or even ten years ago this would have been unanimously and vehemently opposed, but now it is somehow up for debate?
Us peasants cannot stop this, Canada will roll this out soon also, its being rammed through no matter what people feel.
In terms of political power, programmers are more like yeomen than peasants. Yeomen have power due to their essential skills because if a good fraction of them stopped working the system would collapse. (Whereas if peasants stop working, they just starve.) If a sufficient number of programmers said "We're not going to implement or support privacy-invading systems" the government would have to back down.
How is that happening? In the UK fringe nationalist parties are typically given as much airtime on main stream media as the governing parties. They've also setup their own 'news' stations to further spread propaganda. Any notion that they're being censored in the UK is ludicrous. They're pandered to.
This isn't an axis from freedom to control, with the country sitting at an identifiable point. All of these things are happening, antagonistically, at the same time. Right wing people set up a television station, government cracks down on the internet, courts protect people's rights to express philosophical beliefs, police record "non-crime hate incidents" for things written online. It's all chaotic.
But there’s no evidence that the UK government is going to disproportionately censor right wing parties on the internet either. It’s just a false analysis to link this possible age gating of VPNs with censorship of the political right.
There has been 15 more years of highly motivated psychologists tuning their social media systems to create addiction, time for those who've grown up through this to become adults, foreign interference with democracy etc. Though I think banning it for children is the wrong approach. Ban the addictive and dangerous features for everyone, adults included — no more infinite scroll, and no more feeds showing content from…
> tuning their social media systems to create addiction Except this has nothing to do with social media nor with children nor with addiction.
The first sentence of the article "under-16 social media ban".